Author Archives: Paul Maiorana

Code For The People is a six-person WordPress development agency based in the UK, known for their great service and the enterprise tools they’ve created. Automattic has acquired them and will be winding down the consulting part of their business as they join our WordPress.com VIP team to continue building the best tools and services for enterprises using WordPress.

We’ve worked very closely with Simon Dickson, Simon Wheatley, and the rest of the Code For The People team in recent years as partners collaborating on projects for our mutual customers, and before that through their many contributions to the WordPress open-source project and community.

They bring a deep understanding of WordPress, unique experience providing solutions for government agencies, and a particular specialty developing multilingual tools, like Babble, for enterprises. We also really appreciate their commitment to contributing back to WordPress, and are excited to have John Blackbourn continue leading the development of WordPress 4.1 as part of Automattic.

And while Automattic has always been a distributed company, and WordPress.com VIP a global team, we’re excited to expand coverage for our European customers as well.

WordPress’s standard search features are capable and easy to use, but when you’re developing search-driven web applications with WordPress, you need a tool ready-made for that purpose. That’s why today we’re introducing our new WordPress.com VIP Search add-on, and are excited to debut it as part of the relaunch of the Kaiser Family Foundation here on WordPress.com VIP.

WordPress.com VIP Search is a new premium service for our Cloud Hosting customers that delivers the features and flexibility of the powerful elasticsearch software—all hosted, managed, and supported by the WordPress.com VIP team.

With VIP Search enabled, your search results will be more relevant and timely out of the box—but the real benefit is that developers can leverage this new functionality to deeply customize your search results, including support for faceted search. With faceted search features, your users can filter search results on your sites however you’d like—by type of content, category, tag, author, date ranges, and more.

We’re excited to share the news today that Janrain, Shoplocket, and Storify have all joined our Featured Partner Program. Now nearly 30 partners strong, the Featured Partner Program helps WordPress.com VIP customers work seamlessly with other technology providers to make their WordPress websites best-of-breed.

We’ve worked closely with our friends at Janrain, Shoplocket, and Storify to integrate their services directly into our WordPress.com VIP platform, and provide a one-click activation experience for our users. And because we’ve done deep testing and code reviews on each integration, you get the same level of performance, stability, and security that you’ve come to expect from WordPress.com VIP.

Janrain Capture provides turnkey user registration and social profile storage through their User Management Platform. With Janrain Capture, WordPress.com VIP customers can collect and store rich social profile data in Janrain’s hosted user profile system and offer a personalized experience on their sites. Learn more »

ShopLocket is the easiest way to sell products from your WordPress.com VIP website. No storefront to set up and no upfront or monthly fees. With ShopLocket, you can start selling on your WordPress.com VIP site in minutes. Learn more »

Storify is the best way to collect media from social networks and enrich your blog posts with tweets, YouTube videos, Instagram photos and more. Create live, multimedia social stories that engage your audience. Learn more »

Danny Sullivan reports on Search Engine Land that only 5% of news publishers are using the Google News Keywords tag, which Google introduced back in September—are you one of them? If not, it may interest you to know that WordPress.com VIP comes with support for the news_keywords tag built-in, via the Add Meta Tags plugin available from your WordPress dashboard.

Google introduced the new tag a few months ago to help publishers make their content more easily discoverable, without having to modify their headlines to inject keywords:

The goal is simple: empower news writers to express their stories freely while helping Google News to properly understand and classify that content so that it’s discoverable by our wide audience of users.

Similar in spirit to the plain keywords metatag, the news_keywords metatag lets publishers specify a collection of terms that apply to a news article. These words don’t need to appear anywhere within the headline or body text. News keywords such as “stocks”, “stock market”, or “crash” would be helpful in allowing Google News to better understand the article content for ranking without forcing the editors to water down the creativity of a great headline. Because the metatag appears only as part of the HTML code of a page, visitors to a site won’t ever see the magic under the hood.

Head over to VIP -> Plugins & Services from within your WordPress dashboard to activate the Add Meta Tags plugin and the Google News meta tag on your site—happy SEO’ing!

And thanks to our friends at Metro.co.uk who added the support for news_keywords to Add Meta Tags!

MediaPass, a WordPress.com VIP Featured Partner, offers one of the best digital subscription solutions on the market. They’re continually adding new features to optimize the publisher experience, and in two weeks will be releasing some major updates for VIP users.

To kick things off, MediaPass is hosting a demo exclusively for WordPress.com VIP customers, partners, and friends—if you’ve ever considered increasing your web property’s total monetization by incorporating paid subscriptions, now’s the perfect time to give MediaPass a try.

Join us on October 4th from 10am – 11:00AM PDT for a free demo hosted by the MediaPass and VIP teams.

Today Atlantic Media launched their new digital-only business publication—Quartz—right here on WordPress.com VIP.

The site is designed with mobility in mind, and to that end, features a responsive and mobile-first approach that is easily accessible from your desktop, tablet, or smartphone — all delivered by a single WordPress site, no app required.

Earlier this year, we introduced a new partnership program where we’re working with technology platforms to integrate their services into our WordPress.com VIP platform, connect them with our VIPs, and collaborate to support the integration and provide a seamless experience for our users.

Some of the world’s biggest brands and publishers rely on WordPress.com VIP, and every day we connect our VIPs with top service providers for their WordPress development and design needs.

“As a team that relies heavily on WordPress, we have worked closely with Automattic and the WordPress.com VIP team to leverage their SaaS Hosting solution for the most demanding publishers in the world,” said Nick Gernert, SVP of Platforms for Voce Communications, a Porter Novelli company.

“We’re fortunate to be a part of a program that highlights consultants who are focused on world-class development, as well as user experience and client service.”

If you’re an interactive agency or technology platform and would like to apply for our Featured Partner Program, please get in touch.

Starting today WordPress publishers can easily integrate Facebook features, such as social publishing and mentions, through the new Facebook for WordPress plugin.

The plugin was built by Facebook engineers in collaboration with open source partners, and makes it simple for anyone to make their WordPress site more social – no coding required. The plugin will also work on mobile and support internationalization.

The plugin is built-in to our WordPress.com VIP platform and can be seamlessly enabled on any VIP site. It’s also available for download for self-hosted WordPress sites as well.

Interested in WordPress services for your enterprise site, or integrating your WordPress plugin with an enterprise audience? Get in touch.

This morning we debuted a project that I’m really excited about—our new Featured Partner Program. Our WordPress.com VIP team is now working with select partners to integrate their services with WordPress, connect them with our VIP clients, and collaborate to support the integration and provide a seamless experience for our users.

Each implementation has been reviewed and certified by our VIP team to ensure a well-optimized, secure, and forward-compatible integration with the WordPress platform, and our VIP customers get the benefits of that collaboration.

We’re excited to be working with launch partners Chartbeat, ContextLogic, Daylife, Livefyre, MediaPass, Ooyala, SocialFlow, Uppsite, and Wibiya to provide a range of solutions for publishers, from web analytics to online video delivery to mobile and more.